Chain Strike – Chess in Anime Form

Chain Strike is a story based RPG that focuses on strategy element linked to a chess board.

In Chain Strike, you control your team of Guardians progressing through a story that tasks you with protecting the Empire against an invading force, all told through the frame of some kind of time travel malarkey. Honestly, the story isn’t really that important, but it provides a nice little framework to enjoy the gameplay.

Combat in Chain Strike is essentially an Anime-efied version of Chess. Each Guardian has abilities that can target specific directions, generally attributed to pieces in Chess. If a Guardian has Bishop directional abilities, then their abilities will generally target enemies diagonal to them. Due to this, it is wise to ensure your team is balanced between a variety of different directions – no one would win a Chess game with only Knights, after all.

AP management is pivotal to fighting intelligently. Each Guardian has access to three abilities besides basic movement, each of which costs a certain amount of AP – as you only get three AP to use each round, you need to carefully decide how you want to split up this limited resource between your guardians.

Certain abilities cost more AP than others, forcing you to consider whether one really powerful move is worth losing out on two weaker ones.

Certain abilities cost more AP than others, forcing you to consider whether one really powerful move is worth losing out on two weaker ones.

Though you can’t move and attack in the same turn, just like in chess, defeating an enemy allows you to take their place on the board, allowing you to progress further up the board and maneuver yourself towards more enemies or the target. This takes the Chess comparison to a new level, making you honestly feel like you’re playing Chess, if your Queen was a spell-casting Anime character with massive eyes.

The strategy expands beyond the limits of chess, however – Pincer attacks allow you to utilise your Guardian’s all together so as to deal more damage. By syncing up your attacks between multiple Guardians, you can ensure you do the maximum amount of damage possible.

Due to this technique of pincer moves, Chain Strike is extremely focused on your characters’ placements – many enemy attacks and abilities are specific to tiles on the game board, damaging only enemies that are the in the way. Thanks to this, much of your strategic decision making is spent on deciding where to place your Guardians to both avoid as much damage, and deal as much damage, as possible.

Thanks to this, much of your strategic decision making is spent on deciding where to place your Guardians to both avoid as much damage, and deal as much damage, as possible.

The only niggling issue with Chain Strike is that Objectives and information tend to fly past way too fast – at the start of a level, you will have objectives, as well as bonus objectives to try and complete in a certain time frame. Unfortunately, these objectives will fly past before you’ve even had a chance to register them whatsoever.

Despite this UI hiccup, Chain Strike is an incredibly solid Strategy-RPG game, with a decently rich story that provided a sufficient backing to enjoy the deep gameplay. You’re always making important choices and fighting interesting enemies, and the best part is that you’ll always feel really cool doing it.